Andrea Zittel and Art and Design

Who would have compared chicken breeding with interior decorating? It was a obvious connection to Andrea Zittell who makes the point that both are artificial and fabricated by humans. Through her artworks, Zittell likes to point out habits and qualities of humans that are shaped by the things around them. The goal of many of her pieces is to allow humans to gain a sense of freedom and escape through imposed structure.

I admire Zittel for how involved in her work she is and for her first-hand connection to her audience or purchasers. Her art also encompasses her life experiments and she shares personal stories and projects in the making on her  blog that she updates consistently. She blogs about normal-people things too, like making art on the kitchen table and having mice problems. Judging from her blog post and products she seems to have a demographic of buyers that is upper-class, trendy and interested in the outdoors. This is where it is hard to distinguish between "art" and "products". I could find similar items as the ones she makes in a hip furniture store in San Francisco. These wouldn't be called art though. I aesthetically like what Zittel is doing and I appreciate a lot of her commentary but I think her art can only be affective for those who buy it. How is the work of Zittel different from this new IKEA collection focused on furniture for small, unconventional spaces?

the Sensationalism of Vivian Maier

The work of Vivian Maier is intriguing on many levels and has gained mass appeal over the span of several years. Besides the role of social media, I came up a number of reasons of why Vivian Meyers is so compelling to a contemporary audience.

1. Her photography acts as a diary or visual case study. Her obsessive documentation acts as a lens of her life and of the world around her over the span of many years
2. She is a working class woman photographer when knowledge of and access to film was not as accessible
3. She was self-taught and had a strong eye of composition
4. The nature of her work raises many questions about her the story and story and conditions of her life/ known facts about her life raise questions about her work (such as location and access to cameras)
5. Her work has a historic quality, showing street life during the early 20th century

I am a fan of Vivian Maier's work but  my view of her work is also impacted by the "sensational" quality of her life. In my mind I compare her appeal to that of Henry Darger and Van Gogh. Henry Darger's work has an obsessive nature in it, he was a custodian, he was skilled and self taught and his work was discovered only after his death. Van Gogh is a classic example of the "suffering artist" that never sold a painting in his life and his work is a combination of self awareness and depictions of the country life surrounding him. These are just two examples of artists highly invested in their work that did not achieve fame during their lifetime but have a developed a posthumous type of cult appreciation.

I was very impressed by the research and connections made by Pamela Bannos, especially since she was not familiar with this kind of detective work before the Vivian Maier case. It amazed me how she was able to mark the date and location of photos by small clues and how she was able to draw on newspaper archives for evidence. The way that she tracked her movement of Vivian Maier on Google Maps, used her knowledge of culture and features of cameras of the period to understand Vivian Maier's use and access of them, how she was able to understand that by a subtle change in lighting  that a photo was taken from multiple angles and how a certain door occurring in several photos was the entrance to dark room--these all made me think of the kids of dots that are connected on shows like CSI.

Contemplating Life and Death in a "How to" Video

For my "How to" video I demonstrated the process of separating egg yolks from egg whites. I called this "Contemplating Life and Death" because of the inanimate/ life-like/ visceral quality of eggs have, the duality of the yolk and egg whites, and because moving the egg yolk back and forth between the egg shells seemed like a "contemplating" gesture. Separating eggs seemed fitting for the project since it is very banal, like a lot of "how to" videos. I liked the idea of having a set-up similar to a Martha Stewart cooking show but having a sardonic undertone to it, by commenting on death.

Public Communication

Technology and Media can blur boundaries of privacy. For my project, a friend and I improvised a conversation in the cafe about personal matters that many people would not want to receive attention for. In the conversation, we nonchalantly discussed suicide attempts, experiences with abortions, acting sexually online, having STDS, having a boyfriend in prison and a father that slept with a best friend. At many points during the conversation both of us intentionally become distracted by ourselves (hair or nails) or our cell phone and become less engaged, even though the other person is talking about a seemingly important subject.

I am not trying to poke fun of the topics in the conversation or say that these are things that people should be embarrassed about and I hope that is clear in the video. I chose these as examples of what many students would not to share with acquaintances online or want to discuss in front of or with others that they are not close to. I think that this would have been more of a "performance piece" if the camera were not visibly right next to us. I could have made this more performance-arty by having the camera not visibly next to us and by speaking a lot louder so that those around us could obviously hear what we were saying.

Carol Emmons

Fake flickering candles next to tarot cards, small cradles filled with large metallic pearls, dice and raffle tickets, and old gaudy clocks, text of ambiguous creation mythology. The room seemed like a collection of readymades of discarded spacecraft equipment and thrift store finds. Sun Ra might have approved.

According to Carol Emmons, creator of the work, "I am interested in the apparatuses and fallibilities of varied ways of knowing the universe, and these approaches as lenses through which to experience the world". Emmons is interested in creating "large-scale, site-specific, participatory installations" that challenges the viewer's relationship to their world.

I did not entirely understand the intention of what was in front of me in the gallery space. The objects were uncanny and interesting aesthetically and I appreciated the way that the architecture of the room was taken into consideration. I would like to hear more about Emmon's reasoning for choosing certain objects and grouping them together in the way that she did in order to relate them to the universe. Many objects seemed to be connected to concepts of fortune and chance while others while others suggested aspects of myths and cosmos, but I didn't see clear conceptual understandings of other pieces. 


specific objects relating to chance and fortune that she did. 

Media Interactions

For my interactive performative piece, I will experiment with boundaries of communication by staging a loud and obnoxious phone call in a public place. In the phone call I will talk about fake private and personal matters that do not present me in a favorable way. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, author of "Relational Aesthetics" the "Society of the Spectacle" is "a society where human relations are no longer "directly experienced", but start to become blurred in their "spectacular" representation." I am fascinated by the way that users of social network sites both filter and spew out information about themselves and how easy it has become to know about people by what they project online, without actually knowing them.

Something is Happening Exhibition

Arranging an exhibition, allows one to see a work or body of work in a new context. A photo that has become familiar by being observed on a screen countless times, and in conjunction with many similar photos appears very different when singled out, framed against a white wall and arranged next to the work of others. The title "Something is Happening" for the show is based on the Bob Dylan song Ballad of a Thin Man. As much as I love Dylan, I don't think that the phrase "Something is Happening" is a fitting description for the body of work. Our assignment for our photo set was to address the obliviousness of the general public to a significant change in our environment and to critique our surroundings. Dylan's understanding of change is way different than many of our critiques in the Lawrence environment and I don't think the title really gets the point of environmental critique across. 

Setting up the exhibition was a good experience because it allowed me to see my work in a professional setting and be in the position of showing my work to others I am not close to. There were moments that I felt slightly awkward at the opening when I was in the room with several other visitors and, feeling obligated to be present in the room, wasn’t sure if I should re-look at the work of my peers or “entertain” the visitors. Nothing surprised me about the process of setting up for the gallery show since I have done several small class shows like this before. The curation of the show inspired me to think about how whimsically I would set up a gallery room if I had it for my work alone. 

Rob Neilson examining my photo "Replacer"